"I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen."

Monthly Archives: July 2011

This too shall pass, they say. No one tells you that if it doesn’t, you’ll get used to it too. No?

Edited to add, because I refuse to feel down and out:

This too shall pass, and if not… there’s still loads to be thankful for…

And I will count my blessings till I get the worst out of my system.

I have a husband who loves me more than the world, who makes sure that I’m happy every moment, who will not let me lift a finger these days. There’s no greater joy in my life than to have him beside me. To have him fight my battles for me, if he can. To have him hear me out, patiently, every single time I’m upset. I forget, when I think how different we are, that I’m more connected to him than I have been to anyone else in my life. It must be a past life thing, you know… How I feel comforted even by his silence, how my day begins and ends with him on my mind, how I look forward to every single minute spent with him… When we think we’ve run out of everything there is to talk about in the 15 years of our association, we come up with a zillion other things to talk about… And we go on in the dark of the night, every single night…

How many people are still in love after so many years? How many people are even in love with the same person that they love more than anything else in the world – they are two different things, you realise? Why do I need to go seeking anyone else’s approval or companionship when he’s enough to keep me happy this entire life?

…Super tough, I say! How do you, if you can see your faults, turn into a person you think you should be while carrying a child? I hear it all the time – don’t think like this, don’t stress over this, don’t cry, stay happy. And I understand the concerns. But hello, you’re asking me to stop being who I am without asking the world to change for me. Not fair!

As a mother-to-be, I realise I must do everything in my power to make my child’s life-t0-be as happy as can be. And if that requires staying happy, I should happily do it. But someone tell the world to keep me happy, okay? To listen to me, to do my bidding once in a while, to behave. I can’t promise I won’t cry if there will be things to make me cry. I can’t promise I’ll be all cool and nonchalant when my world’s turning topsy-turvy. I can’t promise I won’t want things I can’t have. I can’t do it!

If work is stressing the life out of me, what do I do – give it up? Oh, I would love to be this efficient manager of emotions I’ve never been, but how do I do it? How do I wake up one morning and say ‘nothing’s gonna get to me from today’, that this is not important from now on? If I could do all of that, I’d write a self-help book, no?

When I got pregnant, I didn’t take on a new personality. And sometimes I worry that perhaps, I should’ve. I mean, I’m not a worrier, I’m not an unhappy person and I can take on the world for whatever it gives me. But I’m extremely perceptive and so, the most trivial of things can get me to fret and cry for days. And then, there’s this feeling I have these days – that all’s not well with my world right now, that I’m getting socked for no fault of mine. Sometimes, you do something you know is wrong and you know you’re getting what you deserve. Right now, I feel clueless about where what’s coming from. I focus on the right stuff, the happy stuff. And then, crash, bam, boom – it all messes up! Send me good vibes, will you?

Money matters. A lot. But how much exactly? Would you be curious about someone’s financial worth just because… you are? Of late, I’ve noticed a tendency in people to assess what a person’s worth, in exact rupees. Like how much they’d be earning, and how much financial backing they have from other sources, and where and how much they’ve invested, and how many alliances they have for the sake of money-making. Which I find completely bizarre.

For one, I don’t know what purpose it serves. I mean, WHY would you want to know all that about someone. Okay, so I’d like to know how much Mr Ambani senior makes, and how much Shah Rukh got paid for dancing at someone’s wedding, or guess how much my boss’ salary would be. But why should I care how much my friend makes by way of his business, what his turnover is and why his dad does not invest more in their business? Unless of course, my friend wants to discuss it with me for a specific reason. (Nobody, by the way, should discuss finance with me. I suck at it!) Or if I was competing with someone professionally. Like if I was Anil Ambani, I’d like to know what Mukesh was all about in every currency. I cannot cultivate an objective curiosity about such things, however.

Perhaps it’s about where these people, who take the time to calculate their friends’ and acquaintances and random strangers’ return on investments, come from. Perhaps in business families, you do talk in terms of what others are worth. And perhaps, because I’m not from one of those families – neither new money nor landed aristocracy – I don’t relate to such assessments. And fail to see where they lead to.

To tell you the truth, in our family, there was also talk of money sometimes, but the talk was about who was earning honestly and who wasn’t, and how pathetic it was that people did anything to make a quick buck. We were very middle class like that. Still our. I still think I can respect someone with character more than I can someone with Swiss accounts of money (which is not to say that everyone who’s rich is unscrupulous). I still don’t get awed by greenbacks, and how much someone spent on a diamond or a wedding party or anything else, if I don’t like what I see. And when I see what I like, I think of what great taste that person has, what creativity, what resourcefulness; not how much money.

The Guy and I find that either we’re blissful in our ignorance, or that we’re just not that kind of people. We also think that if someone were to sit down and work out our financial standing, how unimpressive we’d seem compared to so many other people we know.

But tell me, is it normal to think of how much who is spending on what and where they’re getting their money from? Normal, not in a judgmental sort of way, but normal as in common.